By Mauro Orru

Amazon.com Inc.'s subsidiary Amazon Web Services is working with German car-parts supplier Continental AG to develop a platform to connect vehicles to the cloud and enable function updates throughout their entire service life.

Continental said Thursday that Amazon Web Services is its preferred cloud provider in their long-term partnership to develop the platform known as Continental Automotive Edge.

"Backed by the expertise of Continental and its customers, we are creating a development environment that will speed up the development of highly automated and autonomous driving systems," AWS's Vice President of Engineering Bill Vass said.

Continental said it would train more than 1,000 of its 20,000 software and IT experts in AWS cloud technologies so they can continue to improve the platform and work with automotive manufacturers.

Tests are already underway and the platform will be more widely available from the end of 2021.

Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com; @MauroOrru94

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

04-15-21 0813ET